I popped into the office today with my time sheets for last week. It was a bit of an excuse really to see Charisma as I hadn’t seen her since before Christmas and I wanted to catch up with her about my CPD training and to have a chat about the possibility of other jobs . It turned out to be pants.  She’d promised to help me with my revalidation folder - I know it’s years off but I wanted to make sure I didn’t leave it until the last minute like I do with most of the important things in my life, like paying the rent.  Imagine my face then when she barely glanced up from her pot noodle to chuck me a file across the desk. I grabbed it and flicked through it looking for golden nuggets of knowledge, some carefully curated articles I could write reflective pieces on perhaps. Or the certificates I still hadn’t received from the training I had done, maybe even a list of upcoming training sessions.  Now imagine my face when I realised she’d printed the templates from...

What’s the difference between a nurse and a Police Chief Inspector? Nothing it seems, apart from approximately 30,000 quid a year that is! Today I learnt that part of the extremely varied skill set required of a good all-round nurse is the ability to dig and dig and dig until the truth be found – even if the truth is hard to hear. How so? Let me tell you…  I arrived at Sunshine Nursing Home this morning with a spring in my step and a song in my heart. My nursing career and my passion for it had taken a heavy blow or two over the last couple of weeks but the manager and I had drawn a line in the sand after the medication error recently and I felt positive and vibrant.  Optimism will be the death of me!  My shift started out relatively routinely . I made sure all my patients were okay. I spent a while ‘persuading’ the GP secretary that my opinion about a patient who needed to be seen by the doctor trumped hers. I cracked out the medication round accurately and in...